# Efficient Video Object Segmentation via Modulated Cross-Attention Memory

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.17937 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17937/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 54 of its 67 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Mar 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 54)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [The 2017 DAVIS Challenge on Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00675/) (2017)
- [XMem: Long-Term Video Object Segmentation with an Atkinson-Shiffrin Memory Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.07115/) (2022)
- [Video Object Segmentation using Space-Time Memory Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.00607/) (2019)
- [One-Shot Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05198/) (2016)
- [YouTube-VOS: Sequence-to-Sequence Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.00461/) (2018)
- [Associating Objects with Transformers for Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02638/) (2021)
- [Rethinking Space-Time Networks with Improved Memory Coverage for Efficient Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05210/) (2021)
- [Tracking Anything with Decoupled Video Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03903/) (2023)
- [Focal Modulation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11926/) (2022)
- [Computer Vision for Autonomous Vehicles: Problems, Datasets and State of the Art](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.05519/) (2017)
- [FEELVOS: Fast End-to-End Embedding Learning for Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09513/) (2019)
- [Learning Video Object Segmentation from Static Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.02646/) (2016)
- [Decoupling Features in Hierarchical Propagation for Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09782/) (2022)
- [Collaborative Video Object Segmentation by Foreground-Background Integration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08333/) (2020)
- [A Survey on Deep Learning Technique for Video Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.01153/) (2021)
- [Modular Interactive Video Object Segmentation: Interaction-to-Mask, Propagation and Difference-Aware Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.07941/) (2021)
- [Video Object Segmentation with Episodic Graph Memory Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.07020/) (2020)
- [Kernelized Memory Network for Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08270/) (2020)
- [Online Adaptation of Convolutional Neural Networks for Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.09364/) (2017)
- [SSTVOS: Sparse Spatiotemporal Transformers for Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.08833/) (2021)
- [Video Object Segmentation with Adaptive Feature Bank and Uncertain-Region Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.07958/) (2020)
- [Efficient Video Object Segmentation via Network Modulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.01218/) (2018)
- [Global Context Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.09959/) (2022)
- [Video Object Segmentation Without Temporal Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.06031/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [EdgeTAM: On-Device Track Anything Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.07256/) (2025)
- [GroupMamba: Efficient Group-Based Visual State Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.13772/) (2024)
- [SANSA: Unleashing the Hidden Semantics in SAM2 for Few-Shot Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21795/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recently, transformer-based approaches have shown promising results for semi-supervised video object segmentation. However, these approaches typically struggle on long videos due to increased GPU memory demands, as they frequently expand the memory bank every few frames. We propose a transformer-based approach, named MAVOS, that introduces an optimized and dynamic long-term modulated cross-attention (MCA) memory to model temporal smoothness without requiring frequent memory expansion. The proposed MCA effectively encodes both local and global features at various levels of granularity while efficiently maintaining consistent speed regardless of the video length. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks, LVOS, Long-Time Video, and DAVIS 2017, demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed contributions leading to real-time inference and markedly reduced memory demands without any degradation in segmentation accuracy on long videos. Compared to the best existing transformer-based approach, our MAVOS increases the speed by 7.6x, while significantly reducing the GPU memory by 87% with comparable segmentation performance on short and long video datasets. Notably on the LVOS dataset, our MAVOS achieves a J&F score of 63.3% while operating at 37 frames per second (FPS) on a single V100 GPU. Our code and models will be publicly available at: https://github.com/Amshaker/MAVOS.